Austin, Texas – October 15, 2010 – For OEM software
developer Blue Peach, sales of its flagship CIFS
software stack has been bucking the trends in this
tough economic time. To take advantage of some of
that growth and to make an even larger impact in the
market, Blue Peach will be offering its full featured
CIFS network file sharing stack at no charge for a
limited time. Blue Peach's Blue Share CIFS stack is a high
performing, small footprint stack designed for
embedded platforms and value-added networking
products. It is designed for both proprietary and
commercial RTOSs as well as protected mode multi-user
operating systems like Linux, WinCE, and OSX.. Blue Share provides both client and
server capabilities and all features necessary to
seamlessly integrate with existing home and
enterprise networks.

This bold move is being instituted to raise the
awareness in the market place of both Blue Peach, and
their Blue Share product and to
significantly increase the deployments of Blue
Share. This
strategy is being taken at a time when product OEMs
are attempting to differentiate their products yet
are increasingly constrained in their software
purchases. As a result, they are often turning to
open source software but are faced with the dilemmas
of size, complexity, support, and the added worries
of integrating their applications with open source
licensing. Blue Share is a commercial grade
product, offering the same level of functionality as
open source alternatives, yet in a much smaller
footprint, and without restrictions on how
applications can integrate with the product.

CIFS is a network protocol designed to allow the
sharing of files between systems over a network.
There are typically two types of systems involved in
this file sharing, clients and servers. Clients
access files that are stored on a server. Many
systems operate as both a client and a server which
is the case with most desktop systems in use today.
These desktop systems can both access files on a file
server, but system admin and other users can also
access files on shared folders on the desktop
machine. With Blue Peach's Blue Share™ software, any
device can participate in this same network of file
sharing nodes of desktops and file servers.

CIFS allows the sharing of directories, files,
printers and other types of objects represented using
file semantics over a network. CIFS also provide
mechanisms for discovering servers, browsing for
shares, listing of files, authenticating access, and
securing communications.

Network file sharing provides many benefits and CIFS
is the most widely deployed and most cross platform
friendly of all available file sharing
protocols.Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Network
File Sharing are closely related since all NAS
devices use some form of protocol to access files.
Most NAS devices today use CIFS. Embedded devices,
enabled with CIFS, are able to access files on most
NAS devices on the market.

The benefits of Network File Sharing are intuitive
but in an embedded space, there are unique
capabilities that become possible once the device is
able to share files over a network:

no need for hard disk storage or large flash
storage which can reduce costs

storage can be used more efficiently and shared
among many devices which also will reduce cost

devices can share state and files reducing the
need for complicated synchronization
mechanisms.

unicode file names allowing for non English and
Western European languages.

global file name space. Users need not be aware
of the network nature of the files and all accesses
occur transparently over the network.

CIFS needs little from a host RTOS or operating
system. Blue Share provides all layered functions
needed with the exception of a TCP/IP networking
stack and basic operating system fundamentals such as
threads, and related synchronization mechanisms.
Secure Authentication requires a cryptographic stack
like openssl and a CIFS server requires underlying
host file system support.

Some examples of applications that will benefit from
this announcement:

Wireless applications that wish to share office
documents or media,

Printers that can print documents queued from
anywhere on the network.

Digital TVs, DVDs, DVRs and other consumer
electronics that can play music, photos, and videos
from computers on the network.

Network attached storage devices

Medical devices that can access and update
records directly

Digital cameras that can print or transfer
pictures without any special software on the target
devices.

In response to questions on why Blue Peach would
offer the product for free, Richard Schmitt, the
company's CTO, responded, "We believe the best
marketing for our product is the product itself. We
could invest a good deal of money in a marketing
campaign that advertises our product, but if a
development organization doesn't get to see first
hand how solid our product is, that it is able to
provide exceptional file sharing capabilities with
remarkable performance and with a footprint that is a
fraction of that required by alternatives, then our
marketing dollars will be waisted." When asked
whether they can afford to give the product away,
Richard added, "As a company, we're in a good spot.
We have a great product, low overhead, and enough
revenue to allow us to be flexible. We want our
software to be deployed in products that typically
would only be considering open-source, we want to
help make file sharing a standard feature of all
network enabled products and we want to show that
file sharing can be added to products with tight cpu
and memory constraints. The best way we can do this
is to offer our product for free. We'll go back to
charging for our stack after some time, but for now,
we are more interested in transforming the device
landscape.

Blue Share
will still be copyrighted and licensed as
royalty-free source code on an OEM product basis but
the license is free. Support and optional integration
services will be provided at their normal support
rate. For further information, visit Blue Peach at
http://www.bluepeach.com.

About Blue Peach and Blue Share™

Blue Peach has been developing network file sharing
and digital home software for the consumer
electronics industry for 10 years. Their software has
been deployed in numerous embedded products including
televisions, printers, cameras, point-of-sale
terminals, medical equipment and more. Blue Share™ is
a high performing, low footprint, robust
implementation of the CIFS network file sharing
protocol. Blue Share™ runs as either a real-mode or
protected-mode application on embedded and desktop
systems. It supports the extended security model
meaning it allows integration with Active Directory
and NTLM secured networks. Blue Peach was started in
Massachusetts, but has recently relocated to Austin,
Texas.